McCain not Machiavelli; comfortable with economic thuggery

It now appears that John McCain is keeping Phil Gramm as his economics guru and National General Campaign Co-Chair. This would disprove my speculation that Gramm’s impolitic statements on the “mental recession” were a deliberate tactic to allow McCain to cut loose from Gramm without spotlighting Gramm’s association with tax fraud, responsibility for deregulatory excess, and other unsavory aspects of Gramm’s record (including, according to HuffPo, investing in soft-core porn films).

This reinforces two things we already knew: (1) McCain is politically clueless and economically heartless, and (2) conspiracy theories are usually wrong, generally overestimating the wit and agency of the assumed conspirators.